Migrating Arch Linux's packaging infrastructure to GitLab

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Posted September 12

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Migrating Arch Linux's packaging infrastructure to GitLab

Three years ago, the Arch Linux community began a migration to the GitLab DevSecOps Platform to modernize our software development tooling and processes. We recently announced a major moment on that journey: migrating our entire packaging toolchain to Git and GitLab. This move completely reshaped our packaging workflow, tooling, and storage — the very backbone of our package creation process.

The move has been pivotal for our continued success as a project. Our package repositories contain nearly 14,000 packages at the time of this writing, and GitLab's collaborative features empower our package maintainers to seamlessly collaborate, promoting efficient and effective teamwork. Using GitLab as a central platform also enhances visibility across the project. We can now effortlessly trace the history of changes, collaborate on enhancements and bugs, and follow the evolution of each package — all in a single place.

Understanding Arch Linux's infrastructure

To understand the complexity of this migration, you'll first need to understand the history of Arch's infrastructure.

Central to our distribution are our PKGBUILD packaging sources, which are the essential blueprints that shape each package installable with pacman from our official repositories. Previously, our packaging infrastructure relied on Subversion for managing our packaging sources.

For more than a decade of Arch Linux's development, Subversion served as a reliable companion for working with our packaging source code. However, the open source software development landscape has transformed significantly since the advent of the Arch Linux project; technologies have advanced and collaboration dynamics have evolved (note, for example, the popularization of DevOps processes and practices).

Recognizing the need to adapt and optimize, we started a journey that would shape the future of how members of the Arch Linux community work together. To enhance collaboration and pave the way for future improvements to Arch, we decided to undertake migration of our packaging sources to individual Git repositories, and we chose to host them with GitLab.................